H.R. Giger was the master of the 'biomechanical' - his own term for a zone where body-parts mysteriously fuse into machine-parts in a surreal melding of animate and inanimate, especially effective when those parts occur in series, as with human ribs or the zip-fastener. Someone who had never seen the work might think it sounded like gimmickry, especially if they knew that he had originally been inspired by Dali. But Giger started where Dali left off, and the depth of atmosphere he manages to evoke, the sheer richness of detail, compels serious critical respect.
This film takes Giger's graphic images and reproduces them in 3-D with movement and music, and it makes for a dramatic guided tour. You're better to ignore the sectioning of the film into ten notional stages of the man's career. This is merely distracting. Only one section-title, New York City, seems to relate to the images - a view from a skyscraper down to the street below, and a subway train looking like a cutaway view inside a machine-gun. The rest appear quite meaningless. Triptych, Atomic Children, The Spell...
One section, however, titled Erotomechanics, could be describing Giger's work as a whole. Because we are never far from those other body-parts where natural creation happens, though we may not catch them at first glance. (Did you glimpse the parted thighs of his lover and muse Li Tobler, dead at 27, but forever haunting his dreams?) That subtle camouflage has skilfully saved Giger's work from being classified as pornography.
Film music is not something we are expected to remember; it is an auxiliary. But the imaginative score by David N. Jahn serves to heighten the effect, spoilt only near the end when a computerised audio-pulse seems to be replicating the word 'hour' and repeating it ad infinitum.
And to think that all of this came out of super-logical and rational cuckoo-clock Switzerland. But maybe that was asking for a one-man revolution like Giger.
This film takes Giger's graphic images and reproduces them in 3-D with movement and music, and it makes for a dramatic guided tour. You're better to ignore the sectioning of the film into ten notional stages of the man's career. This is merely distracting. Only one section-title, New York City, seems to relate to the images - a view from a skyscraper down to the street below, and a subway train looking like a cutaway view inside a machine-gun. The rest appear quite meaningless. Triptych, Atomic Children, The Spell...
One section, however, titled Erotomechanics, could be describing Giger's work as a whole. Because we are never far from those other body-parts where natural creation happens, though we may not catch them at first glance. (Did you glimpse the parted thighs of his lover and muse Li Tobler, dead at 27, but forever haunting his dreams?) That subtle camouflage has skilfully saved Giger's work from being classified as pornography.
Film music is not something we are expected to remember; it is an auxiliary. But the imaginative score by David N. Jahn serves to heighten the effect, spoilt only near the end when a computerised audio-pulse seems to be replicating the word 'hour' and repeating it ad infinitum.
And to think that all of this came out of super-logical and rational cuckoo-clock Switzerland. But maybe that was asking for a one-man revolution like Giger.
